Re: st: A problem while dealing with massive amount of data

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Regardless of operating system, -filefilter- could be used to
standardise on one or other variable name.

Nick

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 9:45 AM, Neil Shephard <nshephard@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28 June 2011 09:19, Mayank Mishra <mayankm16@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I have around two thousand .csv file in a folder which I need to clean
>> and save as stata .dta file. For this I am running a loop in which
>> -insheet- command takes up a file, then it gets cleaned and saved.
>> There is a variable named "option_typ" which is used twice in the loop
>> while cleaning. The problem is, in some files this variable is named
>> as "optiontype". For those files, this do file gives an error and loop
>> stops as it cannot find a variable named "option_typ". What makes it
>> worse is that I don't know, which file have different variable name
>> than used in the do file. So, please tell me what I can do for this
>> situation.
>
> You don't state which operating system your working on, but if your on
> a *NIX based system you could easily use 'grep' to search all your
> files and tell you just which files match (using the '-l' switch) or
> those that don't match (using the '-L' switch), for example...
>
> $ grep -l 'option_typ' *.csv > files_matching_option_typ.txt
> $ grep -L 'option_typ' *.csv > files_not_matching_option_typ.txt
>
> ...will give you two files, whose names should be self-explanatory.
> You can then use these lists to loop over specific files appropriately
> depending on their contents.
>
> If you're not on a *NIX system you could achieve this under M$-Windows
> by installing the UNIX-like shell Cygwin (see http://x.cygwin.com/).
>
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